According to Firefox, there’s no such word as “completionist” but damnit if I don’t like the word and am going to stick with it.

Anyway.

I will admit that a big reason I wish this version of the game had come out for another system is that the Wii controls are just brutal.  Combat in particular, is a mess, even by Prince of Persia standards.  You control your character with the analog stick, which is all well and good, but the combat often has you trying to move with the analog stick AND shake the nunchuck and, well, it doesn’t always work out all that well.

The platforming controls are also pretty shaky at times, though thankfully not in the sense of, say, needing to shake the controller to jump.

See, most games of this ilk are pretty forgiving about camera angle changes.  In some PoP games, for example, if you need to hold the controller stick right to wall-run to a ring, and you keep holding the controller stick right after you hit the ring, you can press the action button again and it will wall run again to the next target, even if the camera angle changed during the initial wall run making “right” no longer the correct direction.

This game… not so much.  I have had far too many deaths caused by a camera angle change in the middle of a platforming sequence, and breaking myself of the control conventions I’ve grown used to has proven difficult.

So basically what I guess I’m getting to is that I really wish this had been ported somewhere where I could play it with a gamepad.

Putting PoP aside, I had a very surreal moment in D&D Online.

I was running around Stormreach, which seems to be the hub city for characters for quite a while, and it started raining, and then I just had to stand there and watch it and listen to it for a while.  Stormreach gets quite lovely in the rain, it’s full of all sorts of glowing lanterns that make for some fascinating patterns of light in the dark.

The first night I logged in to Everquest – and let’s put aside the fact that I probably shouldn’t be getting nostalgic about EQ again – it was dark, and raining, and I fell off the dock that I’d spawned on as a lowly level 1 cleric and nearly drowned before I got to safety.  Then, since I’d started my character on the western side of Antonica, I got to see a LOT of rain fall, especially while I was hiding in the guard towers in West Karana recuperating between fights.  It turned the world grey, and it reduced my already limited visibility to almost nothing, and it was in general a pain in the arse, but watching it rain in DDO made me realize that I’d missed MMOs with weather.

I can’t remember the last MMO I played that had rain.  Dark Age of Camelot did, I think, but that’s nearly as old as EQ1.  I’m pretty sure Rift didn’t bother with rain, and I don’t remember it in Everquest II either.  Some brief Googling turns up a forum post from 2007 on this very topic and it turns out that EQ2 DOES have rain, but only in a few zones and it’s pretty rare.  It also seems that Rift has rain and thunderstorms but I don’t remember ever being caught in one.

Regardless, it’s an awfully nice touch in DDO and makes me want to log in some more.

I have to confess that I ran into a bad case of writer’s block about a month ago.

See, after finishing Defense Grid, I decided to play through Brutal Legend, and when I was done with it I simply couldn’t find any way to write about it.

I mean, I loved the story and characters, the art, naturally enough the music… I just hated the fact that the story was far too often interrupted by painful bits of having to play a game I wasn’t really enjoying.  It was at once one of my favorite games of the year and one of my least favorite games, and I simply didn’t have any way to put that into words.

In the intervening month, I’ve played through Hydrophobia, Singularity, Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood, Ratchet & Clank: Up Your Arsenal, and even taken a couple of hours to play through the bridging DLC that connects Fear 2 to the copy of Fear 3 I have waiting for me to play it, but it all keeps coming back to “man, I should really write something about Brutal Legend”

So, I’ve decided to leave it at what I’ve written so far and get on with today’s topic, which is Price of Persia: The Forgotten Sands.

I did, of course, play Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands last year.  I’m quite a fan of the series, where “the series” is something I define as having started with Sands of Time and then not having any more entries until POP ’2008.

But, I played it on the PS3, and I discovered recently that the Wii version was, in fact, a completely different game and rather well thought of.

Shortly after finding this out, I stumbled across a copy of the Wii game for a hair under 20 bucks, added it to my library, and then forgot about it until the other night, when I finished Ratchet & Clank up and started trolling the shelves for something different.

I’m about three hours into it now – well, since the game doesn’t count the time spent dying, maybe just a HAIR over three hours – and I am nothing but impressed.  Even with the grapevine telling me that the Wii version was something different and good, I had really anticipated Yet Another Shoddy Wii Port, and what I got was a game which might just be my second favorite PoP game yet, and which might even have stood a chance of dethroning Sands of Time if it weren’t for the wagglecombat and the latest in Homicidal Camera Technologies.

It’s pretty (and I hope you’ll just mentally add “for a Wii game” in where it’s appropriate), the environments are nicely atmospheric, the banter between Prince and Companion (something almost completely lacking in the PS3 version) is nicely snarky, and it promises to provide me many more hours of fun times dodging whirling saw blades and arrow traps with Inexplicably Infinite Arrow Supplies.

As a system, the Wii is diving heads on towards its date with the clearance bins.  Its life has been marked by an awful lot of pathetic shovel-ware, just enough first-party titles to keep the Nintendo Faithful, well, faithful, and a bare handful of third party games that have been worth a damn.

As it dies, it’s awfully nice to have found one more title to add into that last category.

I own, on DVD, “Parasite Eve: The Movie”, and I bought “Silent Hill: The Movie” off iTunes a few months ago when it was a $4.99 movie.

I haven’t watched either yet, mind you, because I didn’t want to have the games ruined for me.

Now I can.

See, I finished Parasite Eve a couple of nights ago – and, by the way, serious thumbs up to the game overall, though I did have to use a walkthrough to get through a really awful sewer maze level and the final boss is five kinds of bastard – and the next game off the to-play stack was the recent “re-envisioning” of Silent Hill, which took a little under eight hours to play through.

Apparently I’ve been in a creepy-games mood of late.

Silent Hill : Shattered Memories, to give it its full title, is a big departure from, well, the sorts of things I normally expect from a survival horror game.  There’s no miserly hoarding of scarce ammo and checking every last cabinet for healing items, because there’s no weapons and no fighting.  There aren’t even many puzzles, though one particular one involving using shadows to spell out a message was memorable.  It’s pretty much an atmosphere game, and what you get out of it is going to be directly proportional to how much you let yourself absorb the mood the game tries to set.

I’m torn between praising its use of the Wii hardware and reviling it.  On the one hand, you use the Wiimote to point your flashlight around and to answer calls on your cell phone, you hear scratching from the speaker and throbbing as you check the environment for hidden secrets… it really lends to the immersion.

On the other hand, it has some godawful flailing around moves that you need to do in order to shake your enemies off you when they grab you, since you have no way to fight back.

So it’s kind of a toss-up, really.  I kind of wish I’d played the PS2 version so I would have a real controller, but I don’t think it would have been as interesting of a game.

By the way, I do have a perfectly functional Gamecube.  I even have the component cables for the thing, so I can’t even justify the Wii as “well, at least I can play Gamecube titles in progressive scan mode.”

Anyway.  So, I played Klonoa and Oneechanbara earlier this year, bringing my “games completed” record to, uh, 2.  Not a great record considering the cost of the system and spare controllers and so on.

Oh! And of course we have a Wii Fit that’s been hooked up once.  I think that’s traditional.

So call it $400 for the system and accessories, or $200 per game played.  Not good economics, unless you’re a Neo Geo collector.

I brought that down to $80 a game today by finishing three games AND even played a bit of a fourth.  Go me!

In order, I finished Muramasa, played through Octomania, and finally finished Rayman Raving Rabbids, the game I – as previously noted – bought WITH the system.

Muramasa is a really spectacular game to play – and I’m not just being swayed by Kongiku’s huge tracts of land.  There are parts of the game where you’re running through beautifully painted countryside scenery, and as you run along, the screen gets an aged-silk filter over it and it adds vertical lines so you look like you’re actually running through a painting. It’s a stunning effect.

It does re-use backgrounds and enemy sprites a lot.  That’s understandable, considering how much work each one must have been to create, but it does stand out pretty sharply after you’ve spent a couple of hours at it.  On the other hand, the repetition of background elements lets them do some neat tricks.  For one example, there’s a town background you run through quite often, it’s all lights and festive lanterns and the silhouettes of partygoers being seen through windows.  You get awfully used to this town background, and then they throw the same background at you again – only this time, it’s dark, decrepit, rotting, abandoned.  It comes as such a contrast to the “town” you’ve seen over and over again, it has quite a bit of impact.

I finished the “Momohime” chapter, and I’m counting that as “beaten”, but I may go back and play the other character’s story soon.  I understand that there’s a ton of duplication between the two characters, so I think it needs to rest for a little bit.

Anyway.

After finishing Muramasa, I switched gears and tried Super Smash Brothers: Brawl, the latest in Nintendo’s rather popular line of crossover fighting games.  It’s the first time for me trying any title in the series, and I have to say that it didn’t really stick.

I’ll put it like this:  I played a few matches in the 1P vs. CPU mode, and that went all right, and then I started the “Subspace Emissary” mode that represents the story mode for the game.  I played through 7 or 8 levels of “Subspace Emissary”, and then I got a Disc Read Error.

I walked over to the Wii, reset it, and then just didn’t feel like going back to the game.  To sum up:  I wasn’t annoyed that the console had locked up and I wasn’t annoyed that the previous users of the disc had abused it to the point where I got a read error – I just didn’t have any emotions one way or the other.  I could have kept playing, and probably would have if the game hadn’t glitched on me, but on the other hand I didn’t feel any motivation to get back to it.

Fortunately, I didn’t pay anything for the experience.  For reasons I can’t quite fathom, my college library actually has quite a few videogames in their collection, and students can check them out as if they were, well, books.  Of course I find this out AFTER I spend $25 to buy Batman: Arkham Asylum, when I could just have checked it out of the library, but I will chalk that up to a learning experience.

So after that, I went through the Wii games and pulled out Octomania, which is pretty much a archetypal example of the “quirky Japanese puzzle game” genre – your character is a cute if clumsy magician, the game is a “match x of y color” game with a story revolving around Takoyaki, you face off against various wacky foes, it’s all done very dramatically…

I think I’ve realized that I no longer really care for the genre.

That’s a bit harsh.  I’ll temper it a bit.  I think I no longer care for the genre on traditional consoles.  I think it’s perfectly suited to portable consoles, but it seems a waste to just sit down, at home, and shuffle multiple Octopi of similar colors onto takoyaki grills.

It’s a little sad, because I got hooked on the genre through PuyoPuyo on the PC Engine, but I think I’ll restrain my purchases of similar titles in the future.

I did play through the arcade mode, largely thanks to the game being very generous with powerups after you lose a fight and have to retry it, watched the ending credits, put my initials in the high score table, and popped it out of the Wii.  I think it will be a good vs. game for when I have a friend over, but I doubt I’ll go back to the 1 player mode ever.

As I was putting Octomania back, I was shuffling through the dozen or so Wii titles we have, and that’s when I realized that I still had the Rayman game, that I’d had it since April of 2007, and that I was probably pretty close to the end of it and that I should buckle down and give it a go.

It turns out that I was quite close.  I needed to play through four days’ worth of challenges, which took a couple of hours, and then I got a fairly unsatisfying ending followed by some frankly hilarious credits.

My disappointment at the unsatisfying ending is assuaged a bit by the discovery that there is no “Good Ending” – it’s possible that one exists, but there are bugs in the game that prevent anyone from scoring high enough to find out.

I’m not at all surprised by that.  When Ubisoft was making the game, the Wii was a bit of an unknown – and honestly, most people expected it to fail.  Nintendo hadn’t had the best record with home consoles, and it was coming out in the same Christmas season as the Playstation 3.  Ubisoft can be forgiven for maybe not throwing very many resources at the project.

Bugs aside – and also putting aside the occasional minigame that was not very well thought out – I really enjoyed the game.  I’ve never played a “Rayman” game before, and I doubt I’ll make an effort to seek any of them out; the stars here are the Rabbids and I suspect they’ve supplanted Rayman in the mascot department at Ubisoft.

Awfully productive day for cracking away at the ol’ backlog.  Amazing what you can accomplish when school’s out for a couple of weeks. 

Mind you, in an effort to sabotage the studying I need to accomplish between now and then, I finished off one game (Boing! Docomodake) and started another, that being Muramasa the Demon Blade.  This is a Wii game, and I don’t play many of those, so it’s a nice change of pace.

Honestly, though, after the last few weeks of school, anything would be a nice change of pace.

I haven’t gotten very far into it, but it’s awfully pretty.  It really does show off how impressive hand-drawn sprite animation can be.

SPEAKING of hand-drawn sprite animation, there’s a character named Kongiku in the game.

She’s a fox spirit and seems like she’s got the hots for your character, who is an ancient evil blahblahblah demon thing currently inhabiting the body of a cute and heavily armed girl.

Kongiku has an idle animation that deserved sharing.

Ahh, Japan, you warm my perverted heart.

Boing! Docomodake, by the way, is a pleasant enough puzzle/platform combo.  It’s not a terribly challenging or terribly long game, but it’s a good pick-up-and-play-for-10-minutes game featuring, well, mushroom mascot characters.

Anyway.

After Klonoa, which was a nice 12 hour romp, a victory only slightly tempered by the tendency of game reviewers to say things like “It will only take you about five hours to play through, but it’s a fun five hours”, I could have started the PS2 sequel… but the last time I tried going directly from one game into the next was with the Ratchet & Clank series, and as much as I loved the first one, starting right into the second was a little too much.

Instead I went back to Ayu & Saki, those being the heroines of the Oneechanbara series, a rather eyeroll-inducing girls vs. zombies series that languished in the netherworld of Japanese-only releases until quite recently.  I played through the Xbox 360 version about three months ago, which just happened to end on a bit of a cliffhanger, so getting around to the sequel sounded a good plan.

First things first: If you played the 360 game, the Wii version is a big step backwards in a lot of ways.  There are fewer enemies, much smaller levels, only 8 levels – you play through the 8 levels four times each, but it’s still only 8 levels – no mid-game cutscenes and lower quality graphics.

But – it’s also a lot less frustrating than the 360 version, actually has helpful popup tips that explain how to play, and the graphics are somewhat compensated for by the game actually throwing massive hordes of the undead at you, in numbers that I wouldn’t have expected on the Wii.

In addition, the obligatory gun-using character is much less annoying than the gun character on the 360 version.

Finally, it IS slightly cheaper.

One new thing – both of the sisters have separate storylines that you can play through, something that differs from the kind of interleaved story in the 360 version, but after you clear their storylines, you unlock additional stories for each of the main boss characters.  Playing through those is neat, because you finally get to know their motivations and it answers a bunch of questions that the main stories raise.

Also, Misery’s story ending is quite possibly the darkest ending to a video game I’ve ever seen.

Metacritic gives the Xbox version a 39 score and the Wii version a 55.  I say that makes a 94 overall.  Check ‘em out.

I never got up to much mischief, mind you, but it was fun to read about.

Anyway, the thing that struck me about 2600 magazine is that its name derived from the Blue Box, a homemade device that let you manipulate the phone system’s switching functionality back in the days before ESS switches became the standard.

The general use of a Blue box, apart from pranking your friends, was to make free long distance phone calls.

The general consequence, once the phone company figured out that people WERE using Blue Boxes to make free long distance phone calls, was to get your home – OK, your parent’s home – raided by the FBI / Secret Service / Men In Black.

Seriously.  Free long distance calls used to be the motivating force behind comitting multiple felonies.

The last year I can remember having metered long distance service was 1999, the year I got my first cell phone, and even my landline phone gives me all-I-can-eat long distance for 40 bucks a month.  Moreover, high speed broadband service is nigh-ubiquitous in this country, even if we can’t compare to the Japanese and South Koreans with their 100-Mbit home internet service. I remember being thrilled when the v.32 standard for 9600bps modems displaced the old Hayes and USRobotics protocols and brought prices down to a mere 300 bucks.

The next time someone tries to tell me how much better things were in some nebulous “good old days”, I’m going to, well, OK, I’m not actually going to bring up the days when making a long distance phone call was a luxury that you planned out in advance, but I’m going to THINK it while I give them an amiable smile and grunt of agreement.

One more thought, this from a couple of play sessions of “Onechanbara: Bikini Zombie Slayers” on our Wii:

This is the first Wii game I’ve tried out that features non-stop motion controls, because you need to swing the controller every time you slash or kick someone.  I can only play it in 30-45 minute sessions, because that’s about the point where my forearms plead for mercy.

Some poor bastards in D3′s QA department had to play this game, 8 hours a day, for weeks.  They must have arm muscles like braided steel cabling, or massive medical bills stemming from the worst case of RSI in recorded history, or possibly both.

That being said, I have to give Tamsoft – the developer, D3 is the publisher – some serious cred for building a game around waggle controls, but making it so they’re actually quite fun.  I’m playing through Saki’s storyline first, which means a lot of grabbing a zombie, throwing it into a horde of other zombies, then wading in with Massive Fekking Katana of Doom while they’re all getting back up, sending zombie gore flying everywhere and it all works very naturally, even the special moves and such that I never bothered to learn when playing the Xbox 360 entry in the same series.

It’s not terribly pretty, even for a Wii game, but I’m enjoying the heck out of it.

Every console generation, I buy the Nintendo console.  I buy some accessories for it, and a handful of games, and then I ignore it in favor of playing every other console.  I make sure to buy the Mario game for the console, and the Zelda game for the console, ignoring that I’ve never finished a Zelda title and I can’t stand Mario in 3D.  Eventually, I sell the whole shebang at a massive loss.

The exception is the DS.  I’ve finished a ton of games on the DS.  I’ve even bought and finished New Super Mario Brothers, which has the advantage of not trying to be in 3D.

Anyway, the worst example of this was the Nintendo 64, a system for which – when I sold it – I hadn’t finished a single game bought for the system.

Now we come to the Wii, which I lucked into buying back in April of 2007, when they were quite difficult to find, and a console I bought solely because there was a new NiGHTS game coming out.

For the record, I played the new NiGHTS game all of about twice and got stymied by the very first boss, which frustrated me enough that I haven’t gone back to it.

At least I didn’t buy either the Mario game or the Zelda game yet.

Anyway.  I’ve identified this pattern and my plan is to do something about it, and that something started with actually playing a Wii game to completion, in this case Klonoa.

Klonoa and me have a long relationship.  I didn’t play either the PS1 or PS2 games, but I bought the third game for the Game Boy Advance and quite liked it, enough to buy and play through the fourth game as well.  It’s a little cute even for me – and I have a massive tolerance for “cute” – but I really like the way you get around in a Klonoa title; you play very aggressively for a platform game hero and the sight of a group of enemies is less something to avoid and more something to charge at.

So anyway, having played the third and fourth games in the series, and having the second game sitting in my backlog, I was rather glad when they released a Wii remake of the first game so I could hop on board from the beginning, and even more glad when it came out at a wallet-friendly 30 bucks.

The price reflects the nature of the game – it’s actually rather short.  There’s a difficulty spike in the last couple of levels that sent me back to earlier stages to farm extra lives – and, honestly, it’s a good argument for abolishing the whole “lives” metaphor, as they’re in unlimited supply – but even with the crazy difficulty jump it was still, mmm, 12 hours or so to play through.  Anyone who was actually GOOD at this sort of game could probably do it in 8 or less, I’m sure.

Anyway, to cut this short: It was fun, it kept my interest until the end, I unlocked a bunch of stuff that I’ll probably never go back to (time trials? reverse mode?), and I have both finished a Wii game for the first time and opened the door to playing Klonoa 2.

A good day all around.

No, see, Nintendo finally launched their Club Nintendo points-for-rewards scheme, and it was even thoughtful enough to let me migrate over my “MyNintendo” account and gave me points for the games I’d already bought and registered…

…some of them, anyway.  Which is to say, I got points for the Nintendo-branded Wii and DS titles I’d registered, but absolutely nothing for the long list of Gamecube and GBA games I’d registered.  I understand that I bought them an awfully long time ago and that they represent the Old Nintendo, back when it was a distant also-ran in the console market as opposed to an all-crushing juggernaut, but it would have been nice to get some credit for them.

Anyway, I wound up with about 15 games that were worth “coins”, which is their pseudo currency, and in all I wound up with 600 “coins” with which I could buy…

…well, not a lot, really.  Some bits of fluff that are interesting until you work out that, at 600 coins, you’ve bought approximately $700 worth of DS games to get a Mario-branded DS game rack that looks to hold about a dozen DS boxes.

On the other hand, the coins don’t expire for two years, and they’ve already confirmed that there will be special merchandise around the end of the Club Nintendo year, which is in June, so I’ll just hold on to my coins until then.  The Japanese club gets neat things like Super Famicom-style Wii Classic Controllers, and I wouldn’t mind something of the sort.

One negative side effect of this – now that those little registration cards have actual value, I wouldn’t go buying any “It’s our last copy!” games from Gamestop, unless I wanted to see a lot of “this registration code has already been used!” when I went to go and register it.

But.

Before this term started, I had a little extra time, so I spent it figuring out what games I owned for which systems and which I’d finished and so on. My reasoning was that, well, whenever I’m looking for something new to play, I waste so much time looking through stuff that I sometimes wind up with no time to play whatever I’ve decided on.

It came out to… mmm. I’m actually kind of embarrassed to go into numbers. Let’s leave it at this: It’s a really good thing I almost never pay anything close to full, new price for a game.

I bought a bunch of DVD and CD bins from Ikea. These are kind of cheesy cardboard affairs, but they seem like they’ll hold up and they let me do one of the more important things: Hide most of the games.

I put just about everything that would fit in to a box into a box. It came out to 18 DVD-size boxes and 12 CD-sized boxes. Lots of stuff didn’t fit into these nice Ikea boxes, unfortunately, so I need to find some kind of a home for those nice big Saturn and Sega CD boxed games.

Side effect: Bookshelves with identical storage boxes on them look better than a sea of spines. At least, they’re a change.

Then I went through the boxes and tried to pick one shelf’s worth of games that are either really highly recommended, or that I’ve always been curious about, or that I think I ought to play because they’re part of the overall language of the community, as it were, or that I just bought, darn it, and want to play them at least a little bit even though I don’t really want to, you know, try to finish them or anything.

I left portable stuff out of this, because by their nature they’re usually played outside the home.

I came out with the following shelf o’ games that serve two purposes:

1. Helps me narrow down what to play next, in the unlikely event I have any real time to devote to getting into a game anytime soon.
2. Helps remind me, when I’m in a store and something catches my eye, that I have all of these to play and I really ought to, instead of buying new ones.
3. Helps me avoid the shame associated with the sheer number of games that are NOT on this list, despite their unplayed statuses, because they’re not right in my face taunting me. I have, as an example, something like 6 Zelda games. I’ve never finished a Zelda game, or even come close to getting very far in one. I don’t need to see six Zelda games every time I look at the shelf.

The list:

• Shenmue II (Dreamcast)
• Skies of Arcadia (Dreamcast)

• Final Fantasy IX (PS1)

• Castle of Shikigami (PS2)
• Disgaea (PS2)
• Final Fantasy X-2 (PS2)
• Final Fantasy XII (PS2)
• Grim Grimoire (PS2)
• We (heart) Katamari Damacy (PS2)
• Kingdom Hearts (PS2)
• Odin Sphere (PS2)
• Okami (PS2)
• Sly Cooper (PS2)
• The Maid and Machine Gun (PS2)
• Xenosaga (PS2)
• Ys: The Ark of Naphishtim (PS2)

• Rayman: Raving Rabbids (Wii)
• Eternal Darkness (GCN)
• Killer 7 (GCN)
• Metroid Prime (GCN)
• Resident Evil (GCN)
• Sonic Gems : Sonic CD (GCN)
• Starfox Adventures (GCN)

• Armed and Dangerous (Xbox)
• Brute Force (Xbox)
• Conker’s : Uncut & Reloaded (Xbox)
• Fable (Xbox)
• Fatal Frame II (Xbox)
• Half-Life 2 (Xbox)
• Lego Star Wars II (Xbox)
• Metal Arms (Xbox)
• Panzer Dragoon Orta (Xbox)
• Prince of Persia : The Sands of Time (Xbox)
• The Chronicles of Riddick (Xbox)
• X-Men Legends (Xbox)

• Dead or Alive 4 (360)
• Dead Rising (360)
• Kameo (360)
• Phantasy Star Universe (360)
• Prey (360)
• Rumble Roses XX (360)

• Itadaki Jan-Gari-An R (PC)
• Psychonauts (PC)
• To Heart 2 (PC)
• Tomb Raider Anniversary (PC)

Yeah, that’s a list that’s going to get gone through REAL fast. All those quick-to-play knock-out-in-a-weekend RPGs, for a start…